It's generally believed that LTE-U will be optimised to operate in 3.8GHz etc., but it seems that this trend shall ultimately lead to increased cost per bit. At such higher frequencies we can get the increased bandwidth and hence the increased data rate, but at the cost of increased network infrastructure. Therefore, can't we optimise LTE-A to operate in TVWS? since it's well-known fact that at TVWS we can get increased range because of good building penetration and reasonably increased bandwidth with flexibility and freedom to select modulation type and order.
According to this:
https://allabout4g.wordpress.com/2014/03/12/lte-u-update-from-3gpp/
other frequency bands are being considered too, including the TV bands (TVWS).
I've never been much of a believer in such use of TVWS, though. Increased range is not always a good thing, and especially not for cellular schemes, or worse than that, cellular schemes that want to operate in unlicensed bands. Long range means poor frequency reuse, which limits the number of users one can serve in a given area.
The use cases for LTE-U, among which are IoT nets, seem very similar to the use cases for WiFi. I'm not sure you want to encourage long range in either case. If a scheme is good at penetrating through walls, that kind of limits it usefulness in any congested environment, such as apartments or suburban neighborhoods. To me, TVWS are ideal for providing broadband service to sparsely populated rural communities. That's when the long range helps and that's also where you'd expect plenty of white space spectrum to be available.
What I'd like to know is whether LTE-U is going to have spectrum sensing, like WiFi has. Anything operating in the TV bands will have to, but what about LTE-U operating in unlicensed bands?
LTE-U is the same as LTE, the difference is it need to Operate in the unlicensed band. The challenges come out form this point.
Future Cellular network, should be flexible to work in the unlicensed band and to implement the cognitive radio feature whether fully or partially in order to provide better self organization for the 5G networks.
@Manfredi: Yes, it's true that TVWS can be exploited for broadband internet services for rural and urban areas e.g., IEEE 802.22 and white WiFi or IEEE 802.11af as well it's true that the increased range can be problematic at cellular bands which may cause interference until and unless there exists a very strong interference coordination and management technique.
LTE-U shall operate in unlicensed bands with the concept of carrier aggregation in licensed and unlicensed bands. Since mobile operators always prefer increased data rate with certain QoS, therefore LTE-U must NOT strictly operate in the unlicensed bands which may be prone to interference and hence degraded QoS. In fact LTE-U shall largely rely on network densification with super Small Cell Networks (SCN) with improved beamforming and spectrum sensing techniques. The principle of carrier aggregation may be central for the implementation where the data transmission may take place on licensed and unlicensed bands altogether while licensed bands may be used for control information.
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